Prolific thief who stole 7,000 books to sell online is jailed

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A prolific thief who stole more than £80,000 worth of books from university libraries has been jailed for 25 months.

Darren Barr, 28, took 7,000 volumes from three colleges in Edinburgh from October 2017 to September 2018 and made almost £40,000 by selling the texts to book-buying sites like WeBuyBooks, Ziffit and Zapper.

Barr is believed to have stolen thousands of books from Napier University during his 11-month crime spree, and hundreds more from Edinburgh University and Heriot-Watt.

Following a police investigation, Barr was identified as the suspect and almost 1,300 stolen texts recovered from across Britain.

According to the Edinburgh Evening News, Barr was caught after a PHD student was unable to find a book, despite there being six copies listed as belonging to her university library. On buying a copy of the text from Webuybooks, the student realised that the volume she had purchased had originally come from her college library.

The police were able to build a case against Barr, and on Tuesday he was jailed for 25 months at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

Barr, of Kinross, Perthshire, had pleaded guilty to four charges of theft earlier this year, a court spokesperson said.

Searches of CCTV footage from Napier showed Barr arriving at the library with a backpack and holdall. He then applied for an external reader’s ticket, a strategy he used at both Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt.

Following the hearing, detective sergeant Dougal Begg from Corstophine CID said: “This is one of the most brazen and high-value thefts from our universities that I can ever recall and the amount of money Darren Barr was able to make by resetting stolen books is staggering.

“Had it not been for the staff at Edinburgh Napier University raising their concerns about missing stock, we may never have uncovered what Barr was up to and even larger quantities of books may have ended up being taken from the institutions.

"We conducted a thorough investigation that identified the scale of Darren Barr's offending and ensured he was brought to justice.

“All reports of acquisitive crime are treated with the utmost seriousness and a professional and robust inquiry will always be carried out to identify those responsible.”